Embodying Feminine Power – Exclusive Interview with Deonesea La Fey

Deonesea La Fey is a Relationship and Intimacy Coach whose work blends feminine wisdom teachings with psychology, shamanism, and archetypal work to guide women into their feminine embodiment. Deonesea’s own personal journey from living in chronic inner turmoil and disconnection from her body, to living from the relaxation and radiance of her body’s wisdom led her to become devoted to helping other women do the same. Deonesea’s work speaks to the universality in women’s hearts and psyche while her intuitive gifts provide insight into each woman’s unique needs and desires. A beloved mentor and potent ceremonialist, she is known for supporting women to reach into the depths of their inner world.

Deonesea’s passion for ecstatic dance forms, initiatory rites, and the study of spiritual traditions from around the world informs her work and lends itself to the transformational journeys she provides for her clients.

Deonesea La Fey, Relationship and Intimacy Coach

What inspired you to become a relationship, intimacy, and feminine-embodiment coach?

My healing path began in my early twenties. I realized pretty early on that I had quite some things to clear up from my upbringing that were holding me back in my life. The thing that was most painful for me, that I most wanted to heal through, was intimate relationships. I had very painful experiences with dating and relating as a young woman such that I didn't feel that I was equipped to handle intimacy, and I wanted more than anything for that to change.

So, I set out on a search for what would shift that for me and pretty quickly found women’s studies and tantra. That combination set me on a clear path and from there I went on to work with shamans and priestesses and energy healers, and to study sexuality with the Human Awareness Institute, tantra teachers, and Taoist sexuality teachers. I got very interested in human sexuality and what those teachings mean for our personal well-being and the well-being of our relationships.

Ultimately, all of this led into an understanding of the world of psyche and how impacted our psyche is by what happens to us as children and how that then informs the templates of our adult relationships. In the time in my life when I was learning all of that for my own personal development, I began teaching belly dance classes and I discovered that I was actually a natural teacher. It was easy for me to teach movement and that expanded into adding sexuality teachings into dance classes, which morphed into a tantric dance practice that became the embodiment of those sexuality teachings.

About ten years into that, a friend invited me to be the sexuality and intimacy mentor for her online school for women and that gave me a really natural segue into coaching and teaching in the online world. That was over a decade ago now. All of it really was born out of my own need to heal but then also my own need to share what I was learning. Watching it make such a positive impact on other women's lives made it clear to me that this was my path.

What does “embodying your femininity” truly mean to you – and why do you believe it matters for women today?

Embodying your femininity means learning how to take the concepts that you learn about femininity and bring them down into your body. In many ways women walk around feeling disconnected from their bodies. They're not in their sensate experience, they're not enjoying their sensual pleasures. Instead, they're in their heads mentally writing to-do lists and thinking about the next thing that has to be done. Most women are rarely actually present in the moment and while there are many kinds of meditation practices that bring us into the present moment, so much of what's available in the meditation space is actually male oriented. It's very mind focused. And while it is true that we as women want to tend to our mind - our thoughts and our beliefs - what's also true is that our power and well-being reside in our bodies.

Most meditation forms, especially if they're specifically based in a male spiritual tradition, are about transcending the body to reach heightened states of awareness or enlightenment. For women, from the perspective of feminine wisdom teachings, we are meant to bring our awareness down into our bodies. Our power center is in our belly, in our womb and pelvic bowl.

Embodiment is about learning practices that are based in universal principles of womanhood to come to know the truth of your own unique feminine energy, which is different from woman to woman. Feminine wisdom teachings are about learning to come down into the fullness of the belly, coming to understand what the alchemical vessel of the womb actually is on a physical level, surely, but also on an energetic level. Feminine embodiment is about bringing all of the principles we learn about feminine energy into a lived experience through our bodies. It's how we move, it's how we inhabit our senses, it's how we come to feel the sway in our hips when we walk.

By and large, women are disconnected from that. This is why they're ticking things off of their to-do list in their heads instead of feeling the sensations in their bodies when they’re with their lover. Lovership is one of the places that we can most easily pinpoint the lack of feminine embodiment, but we experience it in other ways too. When a woman inhabits her body and her feminine energy, she feels more centered, more confident, more capable… she feels more anchored in herself. She readily feels her own connection to her body, her senses and her emotions. 

What are the most common struggles or frustrations your clients come to you with?

The majority of my clients begin working with me because they're frustrated in their relationships or in their lack of a relationship. They often come to me to try to understand the patterns that have played out throughout all of their relationships and why they keep surfacing again and again. Other women come to me because they've never enjoyed sex or never had an orgasm, or they long to have truly great sex but they just don't know how to get there. And others come because they just have this feeling that there's something more they could be experiencing, but they don't even know how to name what that is, nevertheless how to get to it. 

With nearly all of my clients, we end up working on their history with their past relationships, with their upbringing, and with their own relationship to their bodies. The majority of women I work with struggle with not liking or loving their bodies and not really understanding how to inhabit their bodies in a natural way.

How do your coaching sessions or courses help women transform their relationships and self-worth?

The transformational work I do with women is rooted in offering guiding principles that help them understand their relational world. Addressing painful points from the past through trauma-informed work, helping women with insecure attachment styles heal that attachment wound, and teaching women to come down out of their heads into their bodies are the biggest parts of the work that I do.

When a woman is connected with her womb space and the body wisdom that is held there, she comes to understand her worth in a new kind of way. Since lack of self-worth stems from having formed a false belief about yourself, my work is about guiding a woman to unravel those false beliefs and find the truth of who she really is. From there, she can develop new beliefs and new patterns of behavior towards herself that then inform how she chooses and creates relationships with others.

Can you describe one of your most powerful success stories (client transformation) that illustrates what you do best?

I once worked with a physically very beautiful woman who had extreme body dysmorphia. She couldn't see that she was beautiful at all and the trauma of her background had convinced her that this was in no way possible. That trauma, paired with the relationships she had had before she started working with me, had also convinced her that there was no way any man was ever really going to love her and, in fact, that good men who treat women well don't exist. In our work together we helped her move into really relishing her own sexual pleasure and getting to know her body differently, as well as starting to date in a new way such that she came to a point of dating several men who were great guys. With coaching, she chose one who was a really good partner for her. She was able to choose based on his character and his consistency so that her attachment system could settle down, she could learn to trust him, and she could allow him to love her and soothe the abandonment wounds from her past. They went on to have a really beautiful relationship. There came a point where she said to me, “I just never could have believed this was possible.”

What makes your approach different from other relationship or intimacy coaches out there?

Like many relationship coaches I am well versed in attachment theory and feminine and masculine polarity principles, and like many sexuality teachers I'm familiar with tantra and also with Taoist sexual teachings. What's different about my work is that it's informed by feminine wisdom teachings.

My training has ranged from sitting with the most well-known leaders in the world at the forefront of the Goddess movement, to studying with dating coaches who specialize in recovery from narcissistic abuse and narcissistic relationships, to sitting with grandmother elders of tribes who teach about how relationships work in a tribal society. Those feminine wisdom teachings on understanding our personal archetypal world, connecting with the spiritual, fully inhabiting our bodies, and understanding sexuality as part of a holistic system rather than something separate from the rest of our lives, are a huge part of the work that I do.

My own personal interests in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and shamanism, and in the way those fields intersect, also informs my work.

For a woman who feels burnt out, disconnected, or overwhelmed – what’s the first change she can expect from working with you?

When a woman comes to me with burnout and overwhelm, the very first thing I always say is, “Before we do anything else, let's get you out of overwhelm.” So, we’re first going to pinpoint the source of the overwhelm and address it head-on. After we’ve down-regulated her nervous system and created a sense of safety and stability, we’ll create a sensate pattern for her with a morning practice and daily touch points that will support her to begin her day from her feminine energy and circle back around to it consistently throughout her day.

When those foundational pieces are firmly established, we can start to build on them with practices for opening her sexuality and addressing what's happening in her relationships.

What are the types of women who benefit most from your programs (mindset, life stage, challenges)?

Many women in my clientele are in their midlife, what I call the Queen stage of their lives. Usually, they're perimenopausal or into menopause already, and they're questioning where they are in life and where they're going next. That said, I do have many younger women in their 20s and 30s and many older women in their 70s and 80s. So, my clientele actually spans quite a large gamut of life stages.

What the women in my programs tend to have in common regardless of what life stage they're in, is that they've achieved some level of accomplishment in some other area of their life like their career or their creative expression or their business or their parenting, but they're frustrated with their intimate relationships either because the one that they're in is unsatisfying or because they're single and would like to be partnered. A lot of these women are very smart women who already know a lot about communication styles and feminine and masculine polarity. They've read the books, and they've learned a lot, and the piece they’re missing is that feminine embodiment, that feminine wisdom teaching component. And that’s where I come in.

How we understand our body as an energy system, how we learn to trace and track places in our psyche that need our attention, how we go back and get our inner child, how we free the wild maiden, how we unravel the patterns that are responsible for how we keep experiencing the same things in our intimate relationships… these are the missing pieces.

I help women learn how to track their own feeling waves of emotion, learn how to come down into their body and inhabit their womb space, recapitulate all of the aspects that are splintered, connect to the cycles of nature, and understand what their archetypes are and what those are trying to express through them. When these pieces are reincorporated, the holistic system comes into play, and the internal world shifts. And then their relationships shift.

What would you like to say to a woman who’s hesitating to invest in herself or in coaching – why should she take the step now?

When a woman is hesitant about stepping into coaching, it’s often because fear is present… and this is actually a good thing. Fear is an indicator that it's her right next step. Fear shows up as a guardian that's trying to keep us safe, and it means that we're turning towards something or putting our attention on something inside of ourselves that's feeling unsafe or threatened. In coaching, we can address that feeling and help find the part that's needing to feel safe and give it actual safety rather than keeping it hidden behind hesitation or indecision.

This is the path to growth.

Sometimes women hesitate because they don't actually understand what the coaching process is or what it could bring to them. Every coach I know has her own coaches, myself included, because we're meant to help each other along the path. As humans, we are built to bond. But many women function in hyper-independence, which actually is a trauma response. That hyper-independence prevents them from reaching towards the help that could actually move them forward, and coaching is exactly that. It's one of the best ways to move forward and move forward quickly. The coaching relationship builds a sense of interconnectedness, which ultimately creates a safe place for the parts that feel unsafe to come forward. Then they can actually start to heal. The more we heal, the more we build interdependence with other humans rather than living our lives in burnout, overstimulation, and overdrive that comes from hyper-independence.

Patterns tend to harden over time. They don't get better on their own. When we have a skilled facilitator who can help us unravel those patterns and find the gems inside of them, we can really move forward on our path in beautiful and unexpected ways.

Deonesea La Fey’s decades-long immersion in the fields of feminine wisdom teachings and relationship teachings lends depth and insight to her coaching. She brings both a breadth of knowledge and highly honed intuitive gifts to women who wish to improve the quality of their intimate relationships and to enhance their pleasure in their day-to-day lives. As a result of 20 years of teaching women how to restore their natural femininity, Deonesea has developed a unique approach that combines practical principles and embodiment techniques to guide her clients through a transformational journey of restoration and reconnection to themselves and to their intimate others.

To see how her teachings can benefit you, see her website.

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